Phantom Of The Deep

Never Seen Alive In Its Native Habitat, Giant Squid Is Subject Of Peabody Museum Exhibit

September 24, 2004|By JOHN JURGENSEN; Courant Staff Writer

Along with a load of herring, fishermen captured a legend in the heavy net they hauled out of a Newfoundland bay in the winter of 1873. It was a ``devil-fish'' in the flesh, a rubbery tangle of tentacles more than 20 feet long. The fishermen killed it with knives and brought the carcass to a local priest, who displayed it in his home.

Draped over the Rev. Moses Harvey's sponge bath was a giant squid, a creature that had existed more as myth and monster for centuries. But because of some ecological upheaval, dozens of giant squid were washing ashore on the Canadian island in the 1870s. Suddenly science could come to bear on the mysterious beast.

Harvey shipped the specimen off to New Haven. There, based on examinations of a handful of carcasses and dismembered parts, a Yale University professor named Addison E. Verrill was feverishly delineating fact from fiction about the giant squid, known by the scientific name Architeuthis (ark-i-TOOTH-iss).

A pale, crinkled piece of that behemoth is still at Yale. Tiny suckers dangle like ornaments at the tip of the tentacle coiled in a glass jar the size of a football. A tag with Verrill's handwriting floats in the brownish alcohol.

His vital revelations about Architeuthis make Yale a fitting place for the opening of a new exhibit on an animal that, to this day, nobody has seen alive in its natural habitat. On Saturday, ``In Search of Giant Squid'' starts its national tour at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Based on an installation at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, the Peabody exhibit illustrates how many of the giant squid's habits are still unknown to science -- and how these enigmas excite our fascination with creatures that withhold their mysteries.

``It is the least-known large animal on Earth, the last monster to be conquered,'' wrote Richard Ellis in his 1998 book, ``The Search for the Giant Squid.''

Before it was called Architeuthis, the giant squid's identity transformed with the fancies of the people who described it. Also known as the kraken, sea serpent and devil-fish, the giant squid has made fearsome appearances in literature and movies, including ``The Odyssey,'' ``Moby-Dick'' and ``Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.''

Its caginess may seem to put it in league with other shadowy creatures, such as the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot, but the giant squid has long had scientists convinced.

``Who cares about the Loch Ness monster? You can't find one!'' says Eric Lazo-Wasem, an invertebrate zoologist at Yale and a curator of the giant squid exhibit. ``People believe that there's a good chance that someone is going to see Architeuthis alive and healthy in its habitat sometime soon.''

Researchers agree that the giant squid is probably the largest invertebrate on the planet, but they're unsure about its maximum size. Some of the biggest carcasses that have washed up measured about 60 feet -- longer than a school bus -- from the tip of the bullet-shaped body to the ends of the two longest tentacles, used to grasp prey. The giant squid's eight other arms are thicker and shorter, studded with suckers lined with tiny teeth. At the base of these tentacles is a sharp, parrot-like beak. Inside, a rasping tongue minces the beast's unlucky prey.

The giant squid is thought to live in the deep ocean, floating in canyons a few thousand feet below the surface. In the blackness, it sees with eyes the size of dinner plates, watching for prey as well as predators, namely the sperm whale. In fact, scientists have gathered much of their knowledge about giant squid from the undigested meals of sperm whales.

But what does the giant squid eat? How does it mate? How long does it live? Does it swim alone or in schools?

Nobody has firm answers, just a composite sketch, a profile built from the pieces of evidence accumulated over the years by dogged scientists like Verrill. A tireless worker who described up to 1,000 species new to science, Verrill retired as a Yale professor and curator of the Peabody in 1907.

``A very large portion of my job is knowing the Verrill legacy,'' says Lazo-Wasem.

The bulk of that legacy is in the hundreds of journal articles he published, but it's also floating in jars. Like the brown beak the size of a coconut that was separated from a giant squid discovered in 1874. Holding the bottled beak in his hands, Lazo-Wasem recalls finding the forgotten specimen on a shelf in the Peabody's basement after a student turned up records on it.

``I had never seen it in the 20 years I've worked here,'' he says. ``How can you be sitting on something like this for so long?''

One significant piece in Yale's place in giant squid research is the 37-foot model of the creature that now -- after being mothballed for five years in another building -- hangs in the foyer of the Peabody. Constructed in the mid-1960s, the model replaced one created under Verrill's direction in 1883 (the first full-size model of the giant squid ever made).